RESTAURANT REVIEW : Carrot Sauce Rules the Roost at A Votre Sante

A few weeks ago, when a friend of mine was visiting from New York, I took her to A Votre Sante on La Brea for lunch.

On the patio was a long-haired man in a loose, pink tank top and shorts with a cocker spaniel on a leash; in the dining room, a table of four businessmen in suits scooped up hummus and tabbouleh. One pretty young woman came in dressed in a black leotard that could have passed for a modest one-piece bathing suit, and dark, lacy stockings.

My New Yorker friend said that A Votre Sante looked like any number of lunch spots on Madison Avenue, but that the customers looked more as she always assumed Californians to look: easygoing, tanned, healthy and/or aspiring to stardom.

This newest branch of A Votre Sante is one of three establishments in a micro-chain of hip, inexpensive health food restaurants. The food itself is largely vegetarian, although there are some chicken dishes, as well as a “Catch of the Day” for fish eaters. There are no dishes made with red meat or with dairy products, and there is no salt on the table, just a shaker of ground green stuff that has a salty enough flavor.

Appetizers tend to be scooping food: salads and sauces that can be eaten with pita bread or chapati. The tabbouleh is juicy and fresh. The hummus is ho-hum. One waiter enthusiastically recommended the garlic chicken appetizer, which turned out to be strips of chicken in an orange-colored sauce that had the same slightly tinny garlic taste as that bottled pre-chopped garlic you can buy in the supermarket.

The hummus quesadilla--a whole-wheat chapati filled with the ho-hum hummus and topped with a carrot-chile sauce--tasted OK, but was a trick to eat: Hummus squeezed out in big dollops every time you went to bite into it.

Much of A Votre Sante’s menu consists of variations on the theme of broccoli, carrots and red cabbage. The vegetarian tostada is a sculpted chapati filled with lettuce, sprouts, carrots, brown rice, black beans and carrot salsa: It’s essentially a spicy salad with lots of carbos. The Dragontail, a slightly jazzy version of a macrobiotic favorite, is fresh sauteed vegetables (carrots and broccoli and a few pea-pods) and tofu spiked with some good black seaweed served on brown rice with black beans on the side.

Carrot sauce is fairly omnipresent: It shows up in three of the five salsas, and many of the vegetarian and chicken entrees. A soft, crumbly lentil croquette, for example, is smothered with carrot sauce and served with a mound of broccoli and carrots on the side.

One evening, when I went to order South of the Border, a sampler of vegetarian Mexican food, the waiter suggested I try T & T instead. “South of the Border is just so many items laid out, one after the other,” he said. T & T, on the other hand, did not suffer from such precise organization, but was a tofu-and-vegetable tamale all chopped up together and cooked in a carrot sauce then served over brown rice with black beans on the side. It’s a dish for people who like to have everything all mixed up on their plates rather than waiting for the process to happen sight unseen in their stomachs.

The citrus chicken was strips of too-sweet chicken that had been cooked in orange juice and mixed with the usual A Votre Sante vegetables and served over brown rice. Asparagus pasta, one of the pastas without carrot sauce, was bright and pretty: green asparagus, red peppers, orange carrots, all served on pale yellow bow-tie pasta. But the sauce, virtually oil-free, had a somewhat watery ginger flavor.

Desserts are sugar-free and non-dairy. Can it be done well? Yes. And no.

A banana cake, by virtue of its tofu cream cheese frosting, was rich and sweet. An apple pie was sweet enough, but terribly ordinary. We were much happier with a cold single-crust blueberry pie and its wonderfully intense berry taste. The coffeecake, however, should not have been cold--it tasted dry instead of crumbly. The coffee itself was old-tasting and not very hot. It’s better to stick with the good roasted grain flavor of Bancha tea.

A Votre Sante, 345 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 857-0412. Breakfast Saturday and Sunday, lunch and dinner seven days. Beer and wine. MasterCard, Visa. Also: 13016 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood, (310) 451-1813; 1025 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 314-1187. Dinner for two, food only, $15 to $45.